Producing 201 - Werner Herzog: "Be the hornet that stings"

Filmmaker Marcelo de Oliverira has been posting at length about his experiences at the Werner Herzog Rogue Film School on the invaluable Scottish Doc Institute blog, and it makes for great reading. Here are some of my favorite takeaways:

Sound is critical: "He continued over the course of the morning to delve into the importance of a director paying attention to sound, how important collecting wild tracks is and how important it is to build up a catalogue of sounds."

Documentaries are feature films in disguise: Says Herzog: 'We should not be the fly on the wall. We should be the hornet that stings. Seize the opportunity to be a filmmaker. You are not a slave to be fact based. We are filmmakers. We shape the film. We are not slaves to the material. We are directors. Go absolutely and completely wild.’

Dismiss pre-conceived ideas in a documentary: "Werner underlined that he does not believe in writing scripts for documentaries.’ This only creates dead films as seen on TV’, he said."

Herzog on being a character in his own films: 'The joy of storytelling is throwing yourself in it. It is healthy to look at yourself with a sense of irony. Think the unthinkable, go anywhere when making a film.’